What is an AWS Fully Managed Service?
An AWS fully managed service is a service that allows an AWS user to consume an AWS service and focus on just managing the data. This helps AWS users to focus more on solving business problems, and less on compliance and security. AWS doesn’t offer this type of service for all of its offerings. You will typically have to investigate each type of service and see what is offered. All their service offerings are highly secure and highly available. These services are being used for mission critical systems and enterprise workloads all over the world. This includes critical government and medical systems.
Why use an AWS Fully Managed Service?
There are several benefits that AWS users can enjoy while utilizing an AWS fully managed service. Some of these potential benefits include operational flexibility, inherited security and compliance, and the potential for cost savings. When utilizing a fully managed service you are typically only responsible for the configuration of the service being utilized. Let’s say for example, we have an AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) instance with Oracle as the RDS type. As users of this service, we will not be responsible for the maintenance and patching of the underlying host. That is the responsibility of AWS. We will only be responsible for the configuration and security of the RDS Oracle database. We can still login to the Oracle RDS instance, but we cannot login to the underlying host. This is a part of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. See What is the AWS Shared Responsibility Model for more information.
What are some examples of an AWS Fully Managed Services?
AWS has several fully managed services. In the example above we listed RDS as a database service that is fully managed by AWS. There are other database services that are also available and are fully managed by AWS. In addition to AWS Relational Database Service, there are also AWS NoSQL databases services, and AWS Data Warehousing database options. AWS has its own NoSQL Database option called Dynamo DB which is a fully managed Database service. There’s also Amazon Redshift which is an AWS fully managed service that can be utilized for Data Warehousing (OLAP) use cases. Additionally, there are also AWS managed services that further abstract you from managing infrastructure. If you want to deploy an application without spending too much time dealing with infrastructure and operations AWS has a service for that. AWS Elastic Beanstalk allows you to deploy your Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Go applications without having to managing the underlying infrastructure. You can simply upload your deployment artifacts and Elastic Beanstalk takes care of provisioning, load balancing, and scaling.
